Andy Warhol - MoMA

Carolyn Lanchner

Andy Warhol

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Stephen Shore (American, born 1947)

Andy Warhol and Silver Clouds at the Factory 1966

Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20" (40.6 x 50.8 cm)

Collection the artist

This book

presents ten works by Andy Warhol

selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Gold

Marilyn Monroe (discussed here on page 13), the first work by

Warhol to enter the collection, was acquired by the Museum the

year it was made, in 1962. It was joined in the 1960s and 1970s

by additional portraits, featuring art collector Sidney Janis,

Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Zedong, and by

the artist¡¯s Flower paintings (page 33), images of electric chairs,

and Campbell¡¯s Soup Cans (page 15), among others. In 1989,

two years after the artist¡¯s death, MoMA mounted Andy Warhol,

the first exhibition to explore his entire body of work, from the

early 1950s to the late 1980s. The retrospective included eight

of the ten works presented in this volume, although at the time

only three of them were owned by the Museum. Since that

time MoMA¡¯s holdings of works by Warhol have grown from 140

pieces to almost 250. This book is one in a series featuring artists

represented in depth in the Museum¡¯s collection.

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Water Heater 1961

Casein on canvas, 44 3/4 x 40"

(113.6 x 101.5 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Gift of Roy Lichtenstein, 1971

Water Heater (1961)

After graduating

from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in 1949 Andy Warhol

moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to New York. Thereafter,

for just over a decade he enjoyed a career as a highly successful commercial artist whose drawings lent a piquant glamour to

the merchandising of fashionable products. He loved his work,

he said, but noted some of its quirks. Later he remarked,

¡°Everybody¡¯s always being creative. And it¡¯s so funny when you

say things aren¡¯t, like the shoe I would draw for an advertisement was called a ¡®creation¡¯ but the drawing of it was not.¡±

By about 1960, Warhol, who had been noticing the work of artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in particular, was

ready to rearrange his own creativity equation. His strategy was,

at least initially, a not-quite-simple reversal of terms. Instead

of making an image of a stylish shoe or other alluring accessory

with the intent to inspire covetous impulses in the readers of

trendy magazines, he would select a black-and-white reproduction of some humdrum object from the tabloid press and

convert it to another, higher form of mercantile temptation¡ª

a unique work of art.

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